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All you have to do is enter the Kimberly-Clark Rock Your School Sweepstakes!

Kimberly-Clark, the folks who make Huggies and Kleenex, are working with Box Tops for Education to give parents a chance to win 100,000 Bonus Box Tops, plus an exclusive concert featuring Radio Disney star Jordan Pruitt for their child’s school.

If you have school-aged kids, you know that Box Tops for Education is a program dedicated to helping schools raise money to develop programs, purchase books, and buy school supplies. I’m always on the lookout for those little labels on the products we buy, and have been collecting them all summer. Now that Lucie is starting kindergarten in August, I’ll have two classrooms to collect them for.

Last year our school’s teachers earned enough to buy a die-cutting machine for classroom projects – around $350. Imagine winning this prize for child’s school - 100,000 Bonus Box Tops are equivalent to $10,000! Here are some of they could buy with that money:

• 20 wireless-ready laptops.
• Enough No. 2 pencils so that when laid end to end they would stretch across the length of more than 145 football fields.
• An educational class trip for 20 students including airfare, hotel accommodations and museum admission.

Wow! Here are some of the details. To learn more go to the Rock Your School Sweepstakes FAQs page. Or you can click here to see the official rules.

• If you are a legal resident of the United States,18 years or older, a parent/legal guardian of a child in grades K-8, and your child attends a school located within the 50 United States or the District of Columbia, you are eligible to enter this sweepstakes.
• Entries are limited to one entry, per person, per day, with a maximum of 80 entries per person throughout the sweepstakes
• Parents or legal guardians of students in grades K through 8 can enter the sweepstakes daily June 28 through September 15 online at www.RockBacktoSchool.com. Winners will be selected at random from all eligible entries on or around September 22.

Look for Box Tops on specially marked packages of participating Kimberly-Clark brands like Huggies, Cottonelle and Kleenex along with many other participating products.

For more information on how to collect box tops, you can visit BoxTops4Education.com. Check out the Box Tops for Education recipe page, too.

From Charlesbridge Publishing comes, Sneeze! by Alexandra Siy and Dennis Kunkel. For fourth through six graders, Sneeze! features nine kids discovering nine different reasons for sneezing including allergens, dust mites, bright lights (a reflex) and viruses. The book features full-color pictures of sneeze-inducing irritatants, human nerves and neurons, all 400 to 222,220 times larger than life.

Since the book shows cells close up, a fun activity to go along with Sneeze! is Make Your Own Cell Cookies.

My son Nathan did this activity in his second grade science class. (Younger children could do this with some adult supervision and older children will enjoy it as well.) The kids in Nathan’s class loved this activity because of the hands-on approach to learning science by using food, and most importantly eating their creations after the activity was completed.

Make Your Own Cell Cookies

Materials:

1. Large sugar cookies (one per child)
2. Cake decorating frosting (at least 4 different colors)
3. Cake decorating candies (at least 3 different kinds) - good choices include licorice, M&Ms, small marshmallows, red hots, Jolly Ranches, etc. Nuts and dried fruit can be used, but beware of food allergies!

Activity:

1. Review plant and animal cells, organelles, and organelle functions. A great website for this is Cells for Kids, which has lots of links to similar activities
2. Explain to the children that they will be making their own “cell” cookie.
3. Each child should choose at least six organelles to create on his/her cookie using the frosting and decorations provided.
4. Allow children to be creative. After they finish their cell cookies, have each child identify the organelles on his/her cell cookie and explain their functions.
5. After they’re done, they can eat their cell cookie. Delicious!

In your area it may be too early for winter coats, hats, scarves and mittens. (It’s gotten cool enough here for sweatshirts in the morning.) With the start of school, we need to remind our kids not to lose their stuff, and A Mountain of Mittens by Lynn Plourde and illustrated by Mitch Vane is a great way to do this.

Honestly, if Nathan loses his gloves every week this year, I’m going to leave him in the lost and found box. Understandably, it was Lucie who really loved A Mountain of Mittens, especially the picture of Molly’s parents who look a lot like my husband and me. Here’s a story description:

Every morning Molly’s parents remind her to come home after school with her mittens, and every day Molly forgets. Nothing works — not Velcro, not crochet chains, not even duct tape! But, Molly is not alone. All the kids at school forget, and soon there is a mountain of mittens in lost-and-found that has grown out of control.

The Charlesbridge website has a great activity for collecting lost mittens, hats, coats and scarves to help kids in need. Your school or scouts probably already has an annual coat drive. A great way to announce and promote the drive would be a short storytime reading A Mountain of Mittens. The cost of admission would be a gently used warm winter clothing item.

Afterwards, take a picture of all the items you collected, and send it to trademarketing@charlesbridge.com. They may post it on their website!

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Lucie begins her first day of pre-K this afternoon, and is so excited to start! A wonderful book from Random House that captures this feeling is Kindergarten Countdown by Anna Jane Hays and illustrated by Lind Davick.

A little girl named Lucy counts off the days by naming what she’ll do in kindergarten, what she’ll wear, and what she’ll learn. The countdown is a great way to prepare kids for that exciting first day of school (if you have a preschooler or in my case a pre-K’er, then substitute the right grade when you’re reading it out loud).

Not only was I thrilled that the main character had the same name (though spelled differently) as my daughter, the book captured the excitement and all the things she had to look forward to - making friends, playing games, practicing writing, using your manners, and so on.

Activities
This would be a really fun book to use as a countdown to the days leading up to school. You could read Kindergarten Countdown and combine it with a calendar. Assign an activity like “buy school supplies” or “pick out school clothes” to the days before school starts. You could also make time to come up with snack and lunch box menus. Each time you do a countdown to school activity, you could discuss all the exciting things they will be doing, and answer any questions your son or daughter may have.

If your child is apprehensive about his or her first day, having a Kindergarten Countdown activity would be a good way to help them through their fears. You may even want to combine the calendar with a “dry run” by getting up early, getting dressed, getting their backpack ready, and pretending to wait for the school bus, or walking or driving to school. Many schools have open houses before the first official day, and that’s a great opportunity for your child to walk around the school, meet the teachers, and find out where the bathrooms are.

More Bento School Lunch Ideas
Are you tired of bento box lunches yet? I hope not because they’re so fun to look at even if you’d never take time to make them. Check out Laptop Lunches, a website featuring American-style bento boxes designed to help book, The Laptop Lunch User’s Guide: Fresh Ideas for Making Wholesome, Earth-friendly Lunches Your Kids Will Love. (A good pairing with this book is Ann Cooper’s Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Children.)

Another site to check out is the Lunch in a Box blog. Blogger “Biggie” makes bento boxes for her preschooler, “Bug.” Read her Need for speed: A mommy’s lunch manifesto. I’m very inspired by this wonderful blog, though I’m not sure how much bento box creativity I can get out of PB&J and pudding - the only two things my son Nathan wants to eat for lunch these days.

(And thanks to The Common Room: Recipe Carnival - LUNCH for the bento links and other great lunch ideas.)

Ironies of ironies, Nathan’s teacher at summer school is making them write in a journal! They have to do at least three sentences on a topic of their choice every day. Plus they have weekly homework, a spelling list, and have to read 20 minutes outloud every day, too. I like how this is dovetailing with what I’m doing here, in my Mother’s Journal, and with our library’s summer reading program. But it’s a lot of work for Nathan, especially for a seven-year-old who has daily karate and twice weekly baseball practice or games. (And we haven’t even started math class yet!)

I believe we’ll have plenty of time to do all the fun things we usually do in the summer, like trips to museums and playdates to the park. I’m especially looking forward to a few trips to the Denver Zoo this summer. In preparation, we’ll be reading three wonderful books from Slyvan Dell Publishing:

Turtle Summer: A Journal for My Daughter - This is a companion book to Mary Alice Monroe’s novel, Swimming Lessons, the sequel to The Beach House. In the novel, the readers witness a young mother, Toy, writing a journal for her daughter, Little Lovie. This is the journal Toy is writing, a scrapbook journal that explains the nesting cycle of sea turtles and the natural life along the southeastern coast, including local shore birds, shells, and the sea turtle hospital.

I like the idea that this is a kid’s companion book to an adult novel. It’s like sharing something growup with your child. (Click here for information on Turtle Summer, learning links and teaching activities).

ABC Safari - A great animal ABC book for younger children. Once you’ve discovered all the animals, turn to the “For Creative Minds” educational section for sorting cards and animal fun facts. (Click here for information on ABC Safari, learning links and teaching activities).

The Rainforest Grew All Around - The Denver Zoo has a rainforest exhibit, which we adore (especially the cool snakes and lizards). This book is almost as good as the exhibit, especially because it gives the song, "The Green Grass Grew All Around" an clever rainforest treatment. The “For Creative Minds” educational section is filled with facts about rainforest plants and animals, how they live, and the products we use that come there. (Click here for information on The Rainforest Grew All Around, learning links and teaching activities).

The book even includes a recipe for Rainforest Cookies that uses several ingredients from the rainforest.

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